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By all rights, I should call this recipe One Turnip + One Onion & Six Cloves = The Best-Ever Lentil Salad. But that's kinda long so let's just go with Best-Ever Lentil Salad, the one I've been obsessing over for a couple of months now. Served either warm or cold, it's Vegan and Gluten Free and Weight Watchers Friendly and High Protein and (naturally!) OhSoGood.
So let's talk new-to-us cooking techniques. Who else keeps their eyes peeled for new cooking methods while perusing new cookbooks or diving into promising-looking recipes? You have to stay focused but upon discovery, at least with me, it's either:

Why didn't I think of that?! (followed by by a head thump) or How'd someone ever come up with THAT? (with a sense of incredulity)

Definitely #2, the idea to add a turnip and a clove-studded onion to cook a big pot of lentils. Ina Garten credits a friend, me I credit sheer genius. Story goes, Ina was never keen on lentil salads until a friend menti…

A light-tasting but hearty soup made with low-calorie, low-carb vegetables. For Weight Watchers, a cup is just 1 or 2 points. Not into pasta? No problem, it's just as good without! ~recipe updated from the Recipe Box, first posted 2009!~
~more recently updated recipes~
Today's recipe comes with a lesson in Italian, compliments of the Epicurious food dictionary. (Sorry, I'd share the link but Epicurious keeps breaking its own links. Google and your Veggie Evangelist don't approve!)

"Minestra" [mih-NAYS-truh] means "soup" in Italian. Most often, it refers to a soup of medium thickness, frequently with both meat and vegetables. "Minestrina" means "little soup" in Italian. It's a thin broth. "Minestrone" means "big soup"! It's usually a thick vegetable soup containing pasta and sometimes peas or beans, usually topped with grated Parmesan cheese. It's hearty enough for a complete meal!

It's a quick, healthy, low carb and high protein breakfast, just "spin dip" (that's what restaurants call their popular spinach and spinach-artichoke appetizers) with runny eggs baked in the same skillet. Gorgeous good! Keep a bag or two of frozen spinach in the fridge, breakfast'll move from great idea to the table in minutes.
BOR-ING. That's me, about breakfast. Day in, day out, I could eat the same thing for breakfast. At school, the morning ritual was an English muffin with peanut butter. (Who else adores how salty peanut butter oozes into the little holes of a just-toasted English muffin?) Then came a cup of yogurt, handy for catching the bus to work. Then for y-e-a-r-s, I stirred peanut butter into oatmeal. (Hmm, is it the warm peanut butter? Maybe!) In last years, it's been another oatmeal porridge, half old-fashioned and half steel-cut, cooked in milk.

But the men I live with (that'd be Jerry and my almost 91-year old father who lives with…

May we just agree to be amazed just how much broccoli and tomatoes really do look like an evergreen wreath with red berries?! Stunning! So very festive!
~recipe updated, first published way back in 2007~
~more recently updated recipes~

WAY BACK IN 2007 Before Christmas awhile back, my friends' mother called, asking for help with a recipe. Mrs. K had seen it in a magazine – or wait, maybe a cookbook? she wasn't sure – and was desperate to find it again. She recalled the basics, broccoli and tomatoes in a wreath shape. But what would bind them? We couldn't think. Not eggs, no, and certainly not gelatin. Cheese maybe? She thought not.

So Mrs K returned to her hunt. Many days and magazine piles later, at last she found her recipe. "It's just butter," she exclaimed exultantly. "Do you really think that just butter can hold it all together?"

It can! And this festive vegetable dish – buttery yes, but still definitely a vegetable – is absolutely deliciou…

A simple creamy pumpkin pie, part pie, part cheesecake in an easy no-rolling press-in gingersnap crust. Totally simple and pleasing!
Does anyone else "count" the weeks? Once upon a time in the paper-based dark ages, I kept track of my life with slim leather calendars that numbered the weeks, Week 1 in January through Week 52 in December. Ever since, I use week numbers to track a now-fourteen-year recipe collection from Kitchen Parade, my online food column, and a twelve-year collection of vegetable recipes here on A Veggie Venture. Week numbers? They mark my March of Time.

The point? Somehow – how did this happen? – here it is, Week 47 in 2016. And these last remaining weeks of the year that include Thanksgiving and the rush to Christmas? They flyyyyyyyyyyy by in a blur.

Since Father's Day, the March of Time here has been punctuated by #PieDayFriday. At first, seven days between pies felt like, well, a week between pies. Now, with the busy-ness of the holidays fast…

A spectacular sweet potato pie, an earthy mix of roasted sweet potatoes and chocolate.
So I've got this little pie thing thing on. It started at Fathers Day five months ago, this idea to make a pie every Friday. Talk about fun! I call it #PieDayFriday and y'know, whether you bake one pie a year or a couple a week, I'd love for you to join in. Consider that a formal invitation, okay?!

Every so often, I'll share a pie recipe that totally worked. This sweet potato pie? It totally worked. Truth is, it's my very first sweet potato pie and out of the gate, it's not like me to make anything but a plain, perfect classic. But thank goodness that the combo of earthy sweet potato and chocolate work so beautifully together. I especially love how the chocolate swirl has almost the same texture as the sweet potato filling. It's like a chocolate sweet potato. Yeah. Good stuff.

When you make a pie every week, for #PieDayFriday or just because, there's room/time for…